Secrets of the 17th Century Medicine Cabinet E-Book

Katherine Knight

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 363

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

What was medicine like in the time of Shakespeare and Oliver Cromwell? How did Charles I cure a headache, or Samuel Pepys get rid of kidney stones? Katherine Knight opens up the delights of the Stuart medicine cabinet in this fascinating romp through seventeenth-century medicine and cosmetics. Documenting the all-important use of household substances and do-it-yourself remedies, this book looks at the emergence of modern medicine from everyday cures such as herbs, oils and foods. Offering solutions for all sorts of nasty afflictions, from digestive disturbances to sexually transmitted diseases, it also describes how our seventeenth-century counterparts enjoyed the benefits of soap, moisturiser and toothpaste. With insights into the lives of those who lived in this remarkable period, Secrets of the 17th Century Medicine Cabinet is more than a medical history - it is an intimate investigation into the private lives of the spirited Stuarts.

Leseprobe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katherine Knight trained as a teacher of home economics before getting married and bringing up her four children. She ran a poetry writing club at the City Lit, Holborn, for many years and has now expanded an interest in the history of cookery with the history of domestic medicine. She is the author of The Mother and Daughter Cookbook and The Poet’s Kit. She lives in Strawberry Hill.

For Daniel, Amy and Helen

Cover illustrations from the Wellcome Collection.

First published 2006 as How Shakespeare Cleaned His Teeth and Cromwell Treated His Warts

This paperback edition first published 2024

The History Press

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© Katherine Knight, 2006, 2024

The right of Katherine Knight to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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ISBN 978 1 80399 812 1

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Contents

Acknowledgements

A Note on Weights and Measures

Foreword

Introduction

1    The Stuart Housewife and Household Books

2    Background to 17th-Century Medicine

3    Herbal Medicine

4    Accidents and Emergencies

5    Fevers and Frets

6    Desperate Diseases: Plague, Poxes and Consumption

7    Diet, Digestion and Food as Medicine

8    Women and Children

9    Old Age

10    Troubled Heads

11    Beauty, Cosmetics, Perfumes and Soap

12    Magic, Superstition and Other Odd Ingredients

Notes

Bibliography and Further Reading

Acknowledgements

This book is based on an article which won the Folklore Society’s McDowall Prize, 2001, for an essay on a folklore topic written by an author unconnected with an academic institution. An extract from this was published in Folklore, Vol. 113, No. 2, 2002, to which grateful acknowledgement is made.

Thanks also for generous help given by the following people:

Dr Richard Aspin, Curator of Western Manuscripts, The Wellcome Institute, and his staff, who made suggestions for further reading and provided background information on the domestic manuscripts I used.

Anne Stobart, Nicky Wesson and other members of the Medical Receipts Research Group for stimulating discussions, and Susan Drury for allowing me access to her unpublished M. Phil. thesis.

Karen Howell, Curator, The Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret, Southwark, for answering several herbal and historical questions.

James Robinson, Curator of Medieval Collections, Department of Prehistory and Europe, The British Museum, and Dr Silke Ackermann, for showing me their collection of magical amulets and rings, and making suggestions for more research.

But, notwithstanding all this, any mistakes that remain are my very own.

A Note on Weights and Measures

The weights and measures of the seventeenth century bore a family resemblance to our own pre-metric ones, but two systems were in use.

The older standard of Troy weight still applied to precious metals, gemstones and apothecaries’ drugs; the avoirdupois system to many other things.

Gideon Harvey, in his book The Family Physician and the House Apothecary, has a helpful table to tell his readers what was what, at least in 1676. The basic unit was the grain, that is a grain of corn, which goes back to Roman times as the smallest unit of weight.

WEIGHTS

A Physical [medical] Pound (which is Troy weight) contains only twelve ounces.

The Druggists and Grocers Pound (being Aver de poiz weight) contains sixteen ounces.

An Ounce contains eight Drams. A Dram contains three Scruples. A Scruple contains twenty Grains.

MEASURES

A Pint measure in most watery Liquors, weighs twelve ounces. Two Quarts make a Pottle, two Pottles make a Gallon.

A Fascicle signifies an Armful. One Handful is as much as a moderate hand can take up. A Pugil is as much as you can take up with your Thumb and two next Fingers.

It may be noted that the Pint in this table is much less than the Imperial standard pint, 20 fluid oz, of recent memory. There may be less liquid therefore in the receipts than might be thought at first reading, provided the writers were using Gideon Harvey’s pint.

Mrs Miller, in Wellcome MS 3547 (1660), gave the same number of grains, scruples and drams to the ounce at the start of her book.

Foreword

Anyone caught up in the recent Covid pandemic ought to sympathise with victims of historical plagues. For instance, in 1665 entire families could be quarantined for forty days, locked down in their homes. Many died.

Even in more normal times access to seventeenth-century health care was patchy. When the Tudor monasteries were closed, most of their attached hospitals had been shut down with them. Academic physicians were scarce and expensive. Apothecaries, who sold medicines, were frequently their antagonistic rivals. Ideas about sickness were still based on classical writers such as Galen.

Herbs were the main sources of effective drugs. Traditional country lore was often helpful, though mixed with magic and superstition. Nursing the sick and supplying cures depended mostly on the family, local priest or village midwife. Notebooks kept by housewives show a very interesting mixture of remedies, rather like our internet, some useful, some problematic. These notebooks are the basis of this book.

Things were changing, though, especially in the later part of the century. The Royal Society, under the patronage of Charles II, included members starting to apply scientific method to the investigation of disease. The development of the microscope revealed a whole new world, hitherto invisible.

Most of the contents of the seventeenth-century medicine cabinet are now long past their use-by date. But we can understand why they were there. They were part of the continuing human search for longer, healthier lives.

Katherine Knight,February 2024

Introduction

I came across seventeenth-century household medicine by lucky chance. I had been interested in cookery history for many years, and when I discovered that the Wellcome Library had a number of unpublished household manuscripts dating from early modern times I went to look at them.

What I found was fascinating. It is easy to sympathise with people noting down recipes for such things as pies, stews and preserves. Making allowance for differences in kitchen equipment, these cooks seem very much like ourselves in period dress. But mixed with the food, there were many recipes – or ‘receipts’ as they were then known – for a multitude of remedies which could be made at home. The diseases treated would nowadays send us rushing off to the nearest hospital: consumption, bladder stone, plague and frenzy, for instance. While the cookery in these manuscripts reveals a reasonably familiar kitchen, the medicine shows a far stranger place, where plants understandably provide most of the drugs available, but where magic can easily bubble up out of ancient traditions.

I wondered how representative these examples were, and went on to compare them with printed sources. The printed books were a little more literate, as might be expected. But there wasn’t much to choose between the presumably more ‘official’ printed books and the manuscripts. Indeed, there was evidence of borrowing between them in both directions, and the printed books had their full share of extraordinary and magical ingredients. If some of the medicines were by our standards barbaric, it was not a simple case of primitive survivals in manuscripts alone.

The compilers of the manuscript collections obviously invested a lot of effort in producing them. They give a general impression of being meant for use, not made for fun. Some were written by several people, occasionally by succeeding generations. But the writers were not critical of what they wrote. Cures which must have been old-fashioned or superstitious even in the seventeenth century were put down pell-mell with sensible herbal medicines, cookery recipes, the family doctor’s recommendations, and items from books and friends. There is little to show whether the remedies were really effective or not, apart from the probatum est, or ‘approved’, sometimes added even to far-fetched items.

There may well be valuable medicine to be rediscovered from old receipts such as these, and especially from oral traditions of country cures. Some plant-drugs have indeed entered the modern pharmacopoeia, such as senna, aspirin from willow bark, and an extract of yew to help cancer.

CAUTION

These receipts are offered for their historical interest, and certainly not for modern use. While some herbal remedies are highly effective they can also be highly poisonous. If they are used at all the dosage must be carefully monitored by an expert. Besides, the herbal plants mentioned may not be the same as the ones in use today. There may be a confusion of names, particularly common names found in different parts of the country.

Some receipts are disgusting, and some involve cruelty to animals. Home distillation of alcohol is illegal and dangerous. Although the good housewife and seventeenth-century physicians were doing their best, there are several reasons why expectation of life is generally longer today!

But the receipts offer a moving glimpse of family life in the seventeenth century, the worries of parents about their children, the suffering that could occur at any moment, and optimism, too. Theories of disease seem to have been left mostly to the academic physicians. The housewife was concerned with practical matters.

This book then is partly about the skills of the home practitioner, and so belongs to domestic social history. It is also a representative collection of seventeenth-century receipts, part of the story of English medicine. But I have also tried to account for some of the more extraordinary ingredients that were used, so it is a book of folklore, too. It shows people like ourselves struggling with health problems, doing their best to cure themselves. If their methods and assumptions often seem strange, they came just before the starting-point for modern discoveries. To look at them is like looking at a family album of faded sepia photographs, where great-great-grandma sits on an uncomfortable chair, with great-great-grandpa unsmiling behind her. They are alien, and yet our kin.

1

The Stuart Housewife and Household Books

THE GOOD WIFE

Superwoman is timeless. She was illuminated in medieval manuscripts, harvesting in fields, milking cows, working in kitchens, busy in child-bed and sick-bed scenes. By the seventeenth century she was even more documented, caring for family and home, standing-in for a husband away at war, helping him in business as an extension of her home duties, or continuing as a widow. It was expected that most girls would become wives and mothers (or servants), with unremitting physical labour. A very few aristocratic ladies had independent interests, in neighbourhood medicine or writing for example, and others became courtesans. But for most, the honourable work of the housewife was normal. Without her, there was no comfort for anyone.

Gervase Markham, whose book The English Hous-wife, intended for ‘anie compleat Hous-wife of what degree or calling soever’, was first published in 1615 and went into several expanded editions after that. The woman’s skills included physic, i.e. medicine, cookery, organising banquets, distillation, treatment of wool, hemp, and flax, dairy work, brewing, baking, and everything else expected in a household. She was meant to be religious, temperate, dressed decently in clean garments, moderate in diet and full of general virtues such as courage, patience and discretion. She was expected to have a pleasant manner, so the household would run harmoniously.1

Home-doctoring had to be fitted in with many other things, but depending on her social position, she would have some help. A woman who was truly proficient in all the skills recommended by Markham was not only a considerable craftswoman, but needed managerial and teaching ability to get the best out of her servants. These servants were comparatively plentiful, but needed supervision, as they were often very young.

To start with, the task of clothing a family in the country meant a choice of wool or linen fabric. Imported silk and Indian cotton could be bought in the towns, but cotton did not supersede traditional fabrics for some time. To get good, hard-wearing woollen cloth the fleeces had to be cleaned, dyed, oiled, carded and spun. The spinning wheel had been introduced to Europe in the Middle Ages, a labour-saving mechanism better than the old distaff and spindle, but even so spinning was an occupation taken up whenever nothing more urgent had to be done. Weaving was a specialist craft, but the sewing of everyday clothes was part of most women’s life. Turning flax into linen, and linen into shirts, sheets, table-cloths and napkins was a similar process. Embroidered fabrics were luxuries. Once made, clothes were valued, and looked after as carefully as possible.

Most food was produced locally, because transportation was expensive and slow, and perishable foodstuffs would go bad on long journeys. Butter and cheese were made from raw milk for consumption in the household, or sent to a nearby market. Milk had to be processed quickly, especially in hot weather. Brewing was a business open to women, though many households made their own beer and ale rather than buying it in. It was an important task. Water might be contaminated, and it was preferable, even for children, to drink ale or beer. Wine was imported in large quantities for the rich, and was used medicinally, as well.

Cookery was obviously of great value, and to feed the family properly every dish had to be prepared from basic ingredients, which came mostly from the farm, garden, or neighbourhood market. Some commodities, such as sugar, spices, almonds and olive oil, were imported, as they had been through the Middle Ages, but compared to local produce they were expensive luxuries. Luxurious, too, was the ‘banquetting stuff ’. The banquet was a separate course, or perhaps an after-dinner party might be a better description. Upper-class families even had separate buildings for the banquet. Elaborate sweets were made from marchpane (marzipan), fruit pastes and sugar-plate. The production of these things was somewhere between art and cookery. You could for instance make sugar-plate coloured and flavoured with flowers.2 Bread might be made by the village baker, but here again a large household might produce its own.

Distillation covered both the making of medicines and cordials from such things as fruit and flowers, and the perfumes that must have added much to the pleasure of home. In the absence of piped water, washing was far more difficult and less frequent, though people still liked to be clean according to the standards of the time. Sanitation was similarly rudimentary.

All this meant that the housewife needed a great deal of stoicism as well as stamina. There were the usual natural disasters to cope with – sickness of all kinds including plague, and irregularities in food supply due to bad harvests. It was normal to have many pregnancies, and common to lose infants. It has been estimated that an average of 160 babies out of every 1,000 born alive did not reach their first birthday.3 This proportion was higher in the unhealthy towns. In the middle of the century, the Civil War added its horrors and losses. Many men died of battle wounds or disease, leaving widows and orphans. Food was often commandeered by soldiers, and destruction of property added to hardship. Even modest houses could be ruined, as well as grander aristocratic establishments.

It is difficult to generalise about the literacy of women. Some girls were taught to read, and privileged ones were educated alongside their brothers at home, but women were not admitted to universities. There were a few schools for ordinary people, but in general girls were taught domestic skills rather than intellectual ones, though running a large household demanded high intelligence. It was of course only comparatively well-educated women who were able to keep household books of recipes and medicines. As so many survive, it may indicate that more women were being better taught as the century progressed, but men too were involved in writing some of the receipts.

HOUSEHOLD BOOKS

These manuscripts give a real sense of different personalities. They are varied in style, some written by several people, some in a single hand. They may be neat, perhaps prepared by young girls to take with them into marriage, while others are more slapdash with blots and cancellations. Over time, a number of people might contribute: perhaps a daughter and granddaughter continuing a notebook which they had inherited. Several have cookery and medical receipts set down without organisation. For instance, in 1699 a cure for urinary gravel appears between recipes for potted tongue and potted herrings. Plum porridge, surfeit water and ‘a Good Baked puding’ are close neighbours.4 Generally the printed books, like Gervase Markham’s, are easier to consult, being divided into sections. A few manuscripts notebooks have cookery recipes at one end, medical ones at the other. Others are devoted entirely to medicines, or as we would say now, treatments. They include such things as poultices and glisters (enemas), not just preparations to be swallowed. Though some appear to be written by comparatively humble people, even the humblest had to be more or less literate. The social range is from roughly middle class to the élite. A few simple country remedies are recorded here and there.

At the top of the range, one beautifully written medical book was owned and used by the Countess of Arundel in her charitable work. A substantial book, about 22 cm by 16 cm, now bound in brown leather, it has written on the flyleaf ‘Liber Comitissae Arundeliae A Booke of divers Medicines Broothes, salves Waters, Syropps and Oyntementes of w[hi]ch many or the most part have been experienced and tryed by the special practize of Mrs Corlyon. Anno D’ni 1606.’ It has been suggested that it was a presentation copy to be given as a wedding present.5 Three copies are known, the one at the Wellcome Library, MS 213, one in the Folger Library, New York, and one at Arundel Castle. It is written in a very clear hand. Red ink was used for the headings, or to mark an important new step in directions. There are very few mistakes. It is divided into logical chapters and has a table of contents. The Wellcome copy has a few additions in a different hand. It was still being used at the end of the seventeenth century, described as ‘a great treasure’, and formed part of the recent exhibition of Henry Wellcome’s collection, Medicine Man, in the British Museum (2003). I must admit that handling this bound manuscript, produced when Shakespeare was still alive, made me feel very close to the person writing it. There was obvious pride in the craftsmanship.

In less formal collections, even in a few printed examples, cookery and medical receipts seem to be noted as they cropped up, with a sprinkling of household hints such as how to make sealing wax and keep your poultry safe from weasels, by rubbing them over with rue. The pocket-book ‘written partly by Edw[ar]d Kidder & par[t]ly by Kath[e]r[in]e Kidder’ already mentioned and dated 1699, was of this kind. There are, for instance, directions to make ‘Little Courons Cake’, followed by ‘A Most excelent Bath for the Goute or lameness by salte humers’,6 which was made from boiled herbs, ‘a large quantity of urin and a good large quantity of ston hors Dung, boiled together’. You put this in a wooden tub and sat with your legs in it up to the knees for an hour a day, for 10 days. ‘It will sartainly Qure the goute though in the hands or arms as well as leggs onely by sitting in it.’ (Horse dung was used as a gentle source of heat for many purposes.) Then, having climbed out of the tub, you got on with the next receipts, ‘To preserve Cheryes in Jelly’, ‘The Green Oyntment’, a magic spell to cure ague, and ‘To make surrop of vilotts’. This is Wellcome MS 3107, Kidder.

Even more interesting perhaps is the book of Select Receipts, ‘taken out of Lady Barretts Bookcase … 1711’ with the name ‘Ann Egerton’ above a book plate. Internal evidence suggests it was started some time after 1648 (Wellcome MS 1071, Barrett). It is about the same size as a chunky Filofax. It consists of medical receipts only, in several hands. The first of these is small, neat and literate, written by F. Head – many of the receipts are initialled ‘F. H.’ and he refers to ‘Grandmother Head’ at one point. This is certainly a man, as he refers to his wife. The second important contributor, probably a woman, initialled her work ‘H. S.’ Both these people utilise archaic material, so one can’t draw conclusions about a more enlightened male or female compiler.

There are many other collections in the Wellcome Library, among which are a small book, written on vellum now dark with age, signed inside the front cover Grace Acton, May 1621 (Wellcome MS 1); and A Book of Receipts by Mrs Jane Baber, 1625 (MS 108), a frail unbound one. Many people had an input into Cookery and medical receipts 1636–47, Townsend Family Papers (MS 774); the size of a school exercise book. Mrs Jane Parker her Booke Anno 1651 (MS 3769) is an example of a notebook started from both ends, with cookery and medical receipts reversed. A rather later household book is Mrs Mary Miller her Booke of Receipts 1660 (MS 3547), a fairly scruffy manuscript 20 cm x 15 cm, written in many hands, with cookery recipes first, medical ones later. Many pages have been left blank, to leave space for additions. The content is similar to those written earlier in the period.

Published works, many written by men for the use of women, were useful to supplement and compare with my research, particularly Gervase Markham’s book. Mrs Corlyon’s manuscript book can be studied alongside With Faith and Physic, The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman: Lady Grace Mildmay 1552–1620 (published 1993). The pious Lady Mildmay was an unofficial medical practitioner, and this book gives many of her receipts as well as devotions. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, of 1621, has much to say about medicine in general and emotional problems in particular.

Another useful one is The Good Housewife’s Jewel by Thomas Dawson, 1596. Mostly cookery, it also contains a short chapter on husbandry, including a humoral treatment for apple trees. The medical section has forty receipts. A small book in black-letter type, The Treasvrie of Hidden Secrets, 1637, was clearly written for women, as it contains a lot of obstetric lore – though of an old-fashioned kind. It also has practical housekeeping tips, cookery and general medical receipts. Later a handbook written by Jane Sharp, a practising midwife, describes her craft and its lore in 1671.

A Mr W. M. who claimed he had been a servant of Queen Henrietta Maria, published a work in three sections under the blanket title of The Queen’s Closet Opened. The first part is medical, The Pearl of Practice. The second, The Compleat Cook, is concerned with cookery, and the third, A Queens Delight, has to do with conserving, distilling and so on, and covers both preserves and medicinal waters. It was first published in 1655 and went through many editions, remaining popular until 1713. He said he had decided to publish the authentic work only because someone else had started to bring it out without authority. Echoing this title is The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened. A closet was a small private room, which often contained curios. It hints at secrets being revealed. Sir Kenelm was a Royalist courtier, traveller, linguist and one of the founder-members of The Royal Society. His book, published posthumously in 1669, was put together by an assistant, George Hartman. It is a compendium of receipts for mead, metheglin, cider and fruit wines, plus potages, savoury and sweet dishes, with only an occasional nod in the direction of physic. It gives a good idea of the attitudes to meat and drink of an aristocrat of the time, a kind of early foodie.

A later book, The Gentlewoman’s Companion, Or, A Guide to the Female Sex, 1675, is attributed to Hannah Woolley, an experienced writer of cookery books. This one is primarily concerned with social duties and etiquette, including letter-writing, perhaps for the upwardly mobile. It contains guides for servants – cooks, dairy-maids, chamber-maids and others, and a small section of about three dozen medical receipts. It demonstrates how generally static household remedies remained through the period.

Herbals were available too, not only describing plants but giving medical directions for their use. The most famous of these is John Gerarde’s Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, 1597. Gerarde was in charge of a physic garden belonging to the College of Physicians. Possibly even more influential for poorer people after the Civil War was Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physitian which first appeared in 1652. Many editions followed, and it is still in print. Culpeper had previously been responsible for translating the official pharmacopoeia, the 1618 Pharmacopoeia Londinensis of the College of Physicians, from Latin into English, so that ordinary people could treat themselves. The translation, with the title A Physical Directory, was published for the first time in 1649, and because it attempted to break the monopoly of the physicians, they did not like it at all. Culpeper, who had trained as an apothecary, did not like the physicians much either, and added acerbic comments of his own.

For those traditionalists who harked back to classical learning, but could not study the original in Latin, there was a translation of Pliny’s Natural History made by Philemon Holland and published in 1601. Those who could read Latin could go back to versions of the classics, of course, and so perpetuate venerable ideas.

MEDICINE IN THE HOME

Those who could not afford the high fees of a licensed physician had to rely on home care, and that usually meant women’s work. Markham acknowledged that looking after the family’s health was a very important part of the housewife’s duty:

To beginne then with one of the most principall vertues which doth belong to our English hous-wife; you shall understand that sith the preseruation and care of the familie touching their health and soundnesse of bodie consisteth most in her diligence: it is meet that shee haue a phisicall [medical] kinde of knowledge; how to administer many wholsome receits or medicines for the good of their healthes, as well to preuent the first occasion of sicknesse, as to take away the effects and euill of the same when it hath made seazure on the body.

However, she had to be careful not to usurp the place of a proper, learned physician, who had spent much time at University, and was thoroughly educated in classical theories of disease. As in religion, she should defer to established authority. Her intellect was inferior. ‘Indeed we must confesse that the depth and secrets of this most excellent art of phisicke, is farre beyond the capacitie of the most skilful weoman, as lodging only in the brest of the learned Professors; yet … our hous-wife may from them receiue some ordinary rules, and medicines …’7

Cookery and kitchen physic were still closely allied. Good food, fresh and naturally produced, was then, as now, accepted as necessary for good health, though dietetics followed the theories of Galen, which in turn depended on the theory of humours (see p. 27). The Middle Ages had added some prejudices of its own, such as the idea that fresh fruit could cause ‘flux’. To be fair, though, this was very possibly true if the water used for irrigation was polluted. The first cookery treatise in English, The Forme of Cury, which dates from 1399, claimed to be written with the help of ‘masters of physic and of philosophy’. ‘A good coke is halfe a physycyon,’ said Dr Andrew Boorde famously, during the reign of Henry VIII.

From Elizabethan times, middle-class and noble households possessed a lot of kitchen equipment, and there were separate still-rooms for making luxuries such as conserves, candies, perfumes, cosmetics and cordials. Sir Hugh Plat’s Delightes for Ladies, to adorne their Persons, Tables, Closets and Distillatories with Beauties, Banquets, Perfumes & Waters was published in 1609, though it contains only a few medical recipes. But the equipment could well be used to produce hundreds of ‘waters’, mostly based on herbs, spices and wine.

PROVENANCE OF RECEIPTS

Although the Galenic system was reformed in the later seventeenth century, traditional treatments lingered on alongside pragmatic remedies. Some items appear to come directly from practical experience – using mashed onion to dress a burn for instance, credited to ‘Mrs Gregorie.’ in the Barrett manuscript.8 Even so it may have originated from a printed herbal.

Many go back a very long way. Pliny, Dioscorides and Galen might describe a remedy using a certain herb or animal part, and it would then persist by copying and translation through the ages, with change of language and some modification, but basically the same identity. Receipts once given shape in writing were difficult to dislodge. For instance, the little Acton manuscript (itself dated 1621), contains both cookery and medical recipes, and the cookery ones are certainly medieval. ‘Browet of Almayne’, ‘viande royal’, ‘Boar in egreduce’ are the same recipes that appear in The Forme of Cury, mentioned above. It isn’t unreasonable to suppose, then, that the medical entries are also of great age, circumstantial evidence for thinking that medical receipts might be handed down through household books for hundreds of years. On the other hand, mention of gunpowder or tobacco proves a more or less contemporary source for some of the cures elsewhere.

There was also an exchange of receipts and ideas between friends. Just as today people collect recipes – ‘Do tell me how you made this delicious mango sorbet!’ – so medical receipts were part of the same social exchange, then copied and perhaps passed on again. The originator was often acknowledged, especially if an aristocrat or doctor. Mrs Corlyon has many such: ‘A Medecine for the Rhewme in the teethe or Gummes taughte by Mrs Maynarde’, ‘A Medecine for the Coughe … La: Russell,’ and ‘A Plaister prescribed by Dr Foster’ are just three examples.9

Some items were undoubtedly taken from published sources. Thus ‘Dr Stevens’ water’ is given by Markham.10 An almost identical recipe, using many of the same phrases, is included in Barrett,11 plus a shortened version. Parker has a celebrated cure for the plague which the Lord Mayor (presumably of London), was said to have received from the Queen herself.12 A similar cure appears in The Queen’s Closet Opened, of 1655, though perhaps from a source common to both. Mrs Corlyon has a much praised plaster, ‘Paracelsus his plaister called Implastrum Fodicationum Paracelsi, good for many diseases mentioned vndernethe’13 which turns up, almost word for word, in The Queen’s Closet again14 though ounces have been changed to drams.

It is easy to imagine Markham’s ideal housewife having just finished some entries in her book after a hard day’s work in nursery, kitchen, dairy, still-room and garden.

She wiped her inky quill on a rag, and sat still for a rare moment’s rest. Her sister had just written to her from London with a wonderful new receipt for an ointment using tobacco, and the latest way to preserve pippins. She had added this information to her notebook, together with directions for making invisible ink and a cordial water which would use up the glut of strawberries in the garden.

She was thinking not only about her immediate family but of her servants, neighbours and friends, as well. Little Betty had a worrying cough. The old carpenter in the village had shrunken sinews, and one of the maids had burnt her hand with hot grease in the kitchen yesterday. But her garden was full of delightful and useful herbs. She was lucky her mother had left her so many good recipes, and had taught her to read and write. Her book was a treasure to her. Some diseases were difficult to manage, but at least she could fill her cupboards with rare waters and soothing ointments. With God’s help the patients might recover.

She sighed. It was getting dark and she didn’t want to waste candles. She closed the book, but she would certainly open it again tomorrow.

2

Background to 17th-Century Medicine

The seventeenth century was an exciting time for well-educated and enquiring men, provided they could negotiate religious fanaticism, political power struggles and the Civil War, and survive the various plagues and fevers which surrounded them. By the end of the century, Natural Philosophy covered wide fields of enquiry, from astronomy, on a large scale, to microscopy, on a very small one. Alchemy flowed from a distant past to a golden future after it was transmuted into chemistry. With hindsight, we can see that ‘science’ was not a new concept. For example, as far back as the thirteenth century Roger Bacon (c.1220–1292), had studied mathematics, optics and astronomy, as well as alchemy and languages. His work on the nature of light anticipated Newton. (The double-edged benefit of science was apparent even then: Bacon described both gunpowder and eyeglasses.) A later philosopher, coincidentally with the same name, proposed a method of inquiry depending on experiment and deductive reasoning. This was Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Many members of The Royal Society, founded after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, picked up scientific method and ran with it into the modern world.

This was just at the top of the intellectual pyramid, however. Men of high social position were frequently sent off to University, either in Britain or abroad, but the rest of the population got by with far less learning. Adult male literacy was not universal. Women were even less likely to be educated. As far as medicine was concerned, physicians were still struggling to make it a profession of high status, like Law or the Church. As in those callings, medicine had to be based on authoritative texts to be academically acceptable. A physician’s training since medieval times included liberal subjects such as rhetoric and mathematics besides classical theories of disease. Only the richest patients could consult these physicians, whose high standing was reflected in their fees. They were in competition with each other, and a person could go from one to another if he was dissatisfied with his cure.

For poorer people there were other ways of getting help without calling in an expensive doctor. You could ask for advice from your family, your neighbours or the parish priest. Some people went to the local wise woman with good results, though it was debatable if magical cures were legitimate. ‘Sorcerers are too common; cunning men, wizards, and white witches, as they call them, in every village, which, if they be sought unto, will help almost all infirmities of body and mind,’ said Robert Burton.1 He concluded that it might be better to suffer than to be damned for meddling with the devil. Given this attitude, it is surprising that ‘white witches’ were kind enough to help anyone apart from their immediate and trusted family and neighbours. An accusation of witchcraft was serious and potentially fatal.

It was possible to find a quack with a miraculous panacea at the fair; or, in towns, to visit an apothecary or surgeon, who had received practical training. Surgery was generally regarded as an inferior craft, best left to artisans. Drugs such as opium, its derivative laudanum, mandrake and other narcotics were given as pain-killers, but they were themselves dangerous and surgery was limited in scope.

Most hospitals had been closed with the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Only a few, such as St. Bartholomew’s, survived. Even serious diseases were treated at home, and recovery depended as much on careful nursing as anything else. A household book must have been a vital resource in trouble. Undoubtedly though, many of the receipts did come from physicians in the first place, though the compilers did not question the underlying ideas.

Nevertheless these ideas had had a long and interesting history.

HIPPOCRATES AND GALEN

Doctors’ treatments, often claimed to be ‘approved’ or with the Latin equivalent Probatum est were used because they always had been. Right up to the seventeenth century, and even beyond, orthodox medicine lay on foundations of Hippocratic and Galenic theory.

Hippocrates of Cos was a legendary Greek doctor (c. 460–370 BC). In fact, about sixty different treatises make up the Hippocratic Corpus, gathered together in Alexandria in about 250 BC.2 The normal state of a stable body was health. Disease resulted from a disruption of equilibrium. Various humours, or physical fluids, were constantly ebbing and flowing through the human system, and the aim of the doctor was to correct any imbalance. Galen later perfected and codified this theory.

Hippocratic medicine was holistic, full of common sense. It laid stress on leading a healthy life, rather than on battling against disease. Diet, exercise, sleep, bathing, and sex ought to be regulated according to one’s temperament, stage of life, and the season. Geographical location was important – marshy areas were known to be unhealthy for example. Bad air was dangerous. Disease had natural causes, and was not inflicted by the gods. If changes in lifestyle didn’t help, medicine might be given. Surgery was a last resort, and too dangerous for a physician to attempt. It was left to specialist craftsmen. Part of the Hippocratic Oath, which dates from somewhere between the fifth and third centuries BC,3 says ‘I will not cut, even for the stone, but I will leave such procedures to the practitioners of that craft.’ The demarcation between physicians and surgeons was to persist up to modern times.

In contrast with the shadowy Hippocrates, Galen of Pergamon (129–216 AD), was a solid historical figure, though later regarded as almost superhuman. He was a well-educated and privileged Greek, the son of an architect. It was said that his father had a dream sent by the healing god Aesclepius, who gave instructions that the boy should become a doctor. Accordingly Galen studied at the best institutions of the time, and in 157 became a physician to gladiators in Pergamon. His experience of wounds, and hence physiology, was invaluable, and after a few years he went to Rome, to treat the wealthy there. He eventually became physician to several Roman Emperors. He was a philosopher as well as a doctor, carried out dissections on animals, and wrote extensively, with passion and logic. He promoted himself as perfecting the work started by Hippocrates. In fact his writings were so brilliant that they remained the best medical knowledge for more than a thousand years. He was so much respected that questioning his conclusions was a kind of heresy, and this held back progress as we define it. If a fact did not fit into Galen’s system, it was assumed to be a false observation, or perhaps humanity had degenerated since his time. In Europe, bodies of executed criminals were used for rare dissections, so it was easy to suggest that they were abnormal anyway.

This was to change slowly during the Renaissance, but at first efforts to improve medicine aimed at correcting corrupt classical texts rather than testing theories in practice.

ANGLO-SAXON MEDICINE

During the so-called Dark Ages, classical writings were saved and copied in centres of learning such as Bede’s Northumbria. Medical texts came to be written in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular too, the Lacnunga manuscript and the Leechbook of Bald being the most famous.4 (‘Laece’ was simply the Old English word for a healer.) These works represent a side step away from the classics to some extent. Although influenced by them, they contain some remedies based on what looks like practical knowledge recently discovered at that time.

The medicine is mostly herbal, but the remedies are much simpler than the later ones of the household books. There is much overt magic such as the use of charms and incantations. Nevertheless, there is a strong family resemblance to some of the receipts of the household manuscripts of the seventeenth century. Ingredients such as earthworms, several kinds of animal dung, foxes’ grease and so on are common to both, and some in fact can be traced back to Pliny, Dioscorides and other classical authorities. It might be surmised that some of these old remedies persisted in folk culture through the Middle Ages, and fragments resurfaced into the manuscript household books.

Theories of disease differed from those of Galen. The body might be attacked from the outside by ‘flying venom’ for example, which caused epidemics, or by the magical elf-shot which brought sickness to animals, as well as complaints such as rheumatism to human beings. A worm might introduce poison and simultaneously remove vitality. ‘Unhealth’ was something which could be removed, perhaps by emetics. Ointments were applied to seal the body against external attacks and to preserve the positive health within it.5

MEDIEVAL (AND LATER) MEDICINE

During the early Middle Ages, medical care had largely been in the jurisdiction of the Church. Healing the sick was a part of its ministry. But there was an obligation on those in Holy Orders not to shed blood, so such men could not offer a complete medical package which included venesection. A lay technician was needed for routine bleeding. Surgery was not a high-status occupation. Increasingly there were lay physicians too, educated at the nascent faculties of medicine in Universities, such as Solerno. This one was particularly well-known to ordinary people because of its compilation of rules for health in the thirteenth century, Regimen Sanitatis Salerni. There were many translations, including one by the Elizabethan courtier, Sir John Harrington, who, incidentally, is supposed to have invented a flushing water-closet for the Queen.

The Crusades brought the existence of Arabic medicine to the attention of the West. This medicine was also based on classical texts of Hippocrates and Galen, but with the addition of advances made in Alexandria and later discoveries. Ibn Sina, known as Avicenna in the West (980–1037) is just one example of a celebrated physician. He produced a definitive Canon of medicine which became one of the set-books of the emerging Universities.